NETL
Contrary to that old cooking adage, “a watched pot never boils,” keeping a careful eye on things—in the kitchen or in the laboratory—can be essential to making a useable (or edible) final product...
Intertek
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As widely useful and broadly applicable as it may be, the ISO 9001 standard covering general requirements for quality management systems (QMS) cannot address all stakeholder needs...
Kevin Meyer
Before you can improve something, you must first have a very clear understanding of what its current state is. Don’t assume you know what it is. Go to the gemba, be it the factory floor, the...
Intertek
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Organizations that build, supply, design, or maintain products, parts, or services for the aerospace industry generally must be certified to the AS9100 family of standards (...
Intertek
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For organizations within the aerospace sector, certification to the AS9100 family of standards—including AS9110 for aerospace maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) organizations...
Douglas C. Fair
Plant-floor quality issues tend to focus on a company’s technical resources. When products fall out of spec, alarms sound and all hands are immediately on deck to fix things. Despite large...
Mark Lee Hunter
The digital revolution is transforming the relationship between consumers and companies. Nearly all business functions are feeling the effects, but conventional marketing sits squarely on the fault...
NIST
Printing 3D metal objects is a booming industry, with the market for products and services worth more than an estimated $2.3 billion in 2015—a nearly fivefold growth since 2010. For this type of...
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
I n our June 23, 2017, episode of QDL we look at STEM education, personal kanban, and common mistakes when using SPC.
“ASME Supports STEM Opportunities Act of 2017”
Congresswoman Eddie Bernice...
Matthew Barsalou
As you drive east on I-70 coming from the Rockies, there is a point where you seem to have stopped descending, but a sign says, “Trucks: Don’t be fooled. Four more miles of steep grades and sharp...
Michael Ray Fincher
To meet the 2018 deadline for becoming certified to ISO 9001:2015, organizations are scrambling to overhaul their quality management systems. One major revision to ISO 9001 is the requirement to...
Liri Andersson
Ten years ago, when we would ask senior executives or company directors what “digital” meant to them, their response would usually be something related to social media. Today, it might be apps, big...
Christopher Martin
Many of us are familiar with the concept of the Ohno Circle, innovated by Taiichi Ohno at Toyota during the 1940s. While familiarity with the technique and the goals it sets to accomplish is one...
Roger Lehman
Lucy felt hollow and dissatisfied. She was a star performer and had just helped her team clinch a large government deal that they had been working on for months. At the celebration that evening,...
Robert A. Brown
Lean thinking has taken its rightful place in the effort to improve efficiency in manufacturing. However, it isn’t fulfilling its potential in many areas, most notably with knowledge workers. This...
Steve Daum
I have daily conversations with manufacturer plant managers, quality managers, engineers, supervisors, and plant production workers about challenges when using statistical process control (SPC). Of...
Phanish Puranam
When organizations change how they compensate employees they are embarking on a social experiment, whether decision-makers know it or not. The trouble is the vast majority of these experiments are...
William A. Levinson
‘We’ve always done it that way” explains why many suboptimal and even obsolete methods are taken for granted. The range chart for statistical process control (SPC) is, for example, somewhat...
Bonnie Stone
In part one of “New Spin on the ‘Stand in a Circle’ Exercise,” I described how Taiichi Ohno, the creator of the Toyota Production System, used the “Stand in a Circle” exercise to help managers...
Chad Kymal
In the 1990s, Omnex worked with Ford Motor Co. to develop the Ford quality operating system methodology, which with maturity and broad experience has evolved into Omnex’s business operating system (...
